Largest Prime Number Ever Has 22 Million Digits
The largest prime number ever has been discovered and it's massively longer than the previously largest prime number known to man. In fact, the new biggest prime is a whopping five million digits longer than the previous record holder. The new prime king has 22 million digits.
If it's been a while since you thought about a prime number, primes are numbers with whole number factors that are only one and itself. The largest prime number known now is 274,207,281-1. The massive number was discovered by Curtis Cooper at the University of Central Missouri as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS).
GIMPS was a collaborative effort that pooled computing power online to find new prime numbers. The huge prime has 22,338,618 digits in all. The computer used to search for the prime numbers made the discovery on September 17, 2015.
There was a bug in the software used though and an alert email wasn't sent out notifying the Cooper of the discovery. The massive prime was found during routine maintenance several months later. Cooper was awarded a $3,000 prize for his discovery. All GIMPS primes are Mersenne primes where the subscript number is also prime.
SOURCE: New Scientist